• Advances in Computational Design
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.229-251
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• 2022

In 2017, an intraplate earthquake of Mw 7.1 occurred 120 km from Mexico City (CDMX). Most collapsed structural buildings stroked by the earthquake were flat slab systems joined to reinforced concrete (RC) columns, unreinforced masonry, confined masonry, and dual systems. This article presents the simulated response of an actual six-story RC frame building with masonry infill walls that did not collapse during the 2017 earthquake. It has a structural system similar to that of many of the collapsed buildings and is located in a high seismic amplification zone. Five 3D numerical models were used in the study to model the seismic response of the building. The building dynamic properties were identified using an ambient vibration test (AVT), enabling validation of the building's finite element models. Several assumptions were made to calibrate the numerical model to the properties identified from the AVT, such as the presence of adjacent buildings, variations in masonry properties, soil-foundation-structure interaction, and the contribution of non-structural elements. The results showed that the infill masonry wall would act as a compression strut and crack along the transverse direction because the shear stresses in the original model (0.85 MPa) exceeded the shear strength (0.38 MPa). In compression, the strut presents lower stresses (3.42 MPa) well below its capacity (6.8 MPa). Although the non-structural elements were not considered to be part of the lateral resistant system, the results showed that these elements could contribute by resisting part of the base shear force, reaching a force of 82 kN.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.83-99
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• 2022

The two, NBD and SCB tests using gypsum circular discs each containing a single notch have been experimentally accomplished in a rock mechanics laboratory. These specimens have also been numerically modelled by a two-dimensional particle flow which is based on Discrete Element Method (DEM). Each testing specimen had a thickness of 5 cm with 10 cm in diameter. The specimens' lengths varied as 2, 3, and 4 cm; and the specimens' notch angles varied as 0°, 45° and 90°. Similar semi-circular gypsum specimens were also prepared each contained one edge notch with angles 0° or 45°. The uniaxial testing machine was used to perform the experimental tests for both NBD and SCB gypsum specimens. At the same time, the numerical simulation of these tests were performed by PFC2D. The experimental results showed that the failure mechanism of rocks is mainly affected by the orientations of joints with respect to the loading directions. The failure mechanism and fracturing patterns of the gypsum specimens are directly related to the final failure loading. It has been shown that the number of induced tensile cracks showing the specimens' tensile behavior, and increases by decreasing the length and angle of joints. It should be noted that the fracture toughness of rocks' specimens obtained by NBD tests was higher than that of the SCB tests. The fracture toughness of rocks usually increases with the increasing of joints' angles but increasing the joints' lengths do not change the fracture toughness. The numerical solutions and the experimental results for both NDB and SCB tests give nearly similar fracture patterns during the loading process.

• Journal of the Korean Recycled Construction Resources Institute
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.514-522
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• 2022

In this study, as part of a study to improve the self-healing performance of concrete structures by applying self-healing capsules made of cementitious materials to cement composite materials, the engineering characteristics of mortars according to PCC(Powder Compacted Capsule) size and mixing ratio were compared and analyzed. For this, fluidity, compressive strength, reload test, carbonation, ultrasonic velocity, and water permeability characteristics were measured according to PCC size and mixing ratio of mortar. As a result of the measurement, the fluidity and compressive strength increased as the mixing ratio of PCC increased, and in the case of the load reload test, the healing ratio increased as the mixing ratio of PCC increased in the 03PC formulation. In the case of water permeability test, it was found that when PCC was used, the reduction ratio of water flow was up to 35 % higher than that of Plain, and when PCC with a size of 0.3 to 0.6 mm was mixed with 15 %, it was found to be effective in improving the crack healing ratio of the mortar.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.797-818
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• 2022

Steel-precast ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) composite beams with demountable high-strength friction-grip bolt (HSFGB) shear connectors can be used for accelerated bridge construction (ABC) and achieve excellent structural performance, which is expected to be dismantled and recycled at the end of the service life. However, no investigation focuses on the demountability and reusability of such composite beams, as well as the installation difficulties during construction. To address this issue, this study conducted twelve push-out tests to investigate the effects of assembly condition, bolt grade, bolt-hole clearance, infilling grout and pretension on the crack pattern, failure mode, load-slip/uplift relationship, and the structural performance in terms of ultimate shear strength, friction resistance, shear stiffness and slip capacity. The experimental results demonstrated that the presented composite beams exhibited favorable demountability and reusability, in which no significant reduction in strength (less than 3%) and stiffness (less than 5%), but a slight improvement in ductility was observed for the reassembled specimens. Employing oversized preformed holes could ease the fabrication and installation process, yet led to a considerable degradation in both strength and stiffness. With filling the oversized holes with grout, an effective enhancement of the strength and stiffness can be achieved, while causing a difficulty in the demounting of shear connectors. On the basis of the experimental results, more accurate formulations, which considered the effect of bolt-hole clearance, were proposed to predict the shear strength as well as the load-slip relationship of HSFGBs in steel-precast UHPC composite beams.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.365-381
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• 2023

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.97-105
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• 2009

This paper studied the cause of the deterioration of the four 3-Arch tunnels built in mid-1990. The common deteriorations of the four 3-Arch tunnels were longitudinal cracks, leakage and efflorescence at the same parts of lining concrete. Three fourths of 3-Arch tunnels, there was high percentage longitudinal cracks and a quarter was low frequency about longitudinal cracks. So the material reviewed to find out the differences between two groups in construction process and analysis was conducted such as non-destructive testing, precise visual survey and safety evaluation of one tunnel which had bad ground condition As the result, the tunnels were safety condition and the primary deterioration occurred during the construction process, namely, problems arrangement of rebar and the effects of the blast at middle tunnel.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.3
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• pp.345-360
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• 2022

In this paper, the impact on seismic performance of an economical effective technique for retrofitting reinforced concrete (RC) columns using high-strength steel strips under high axial compression ratios was presented. The experimental program included a series of cyclic loading tests on one nonretrofitted control specimen and three retrofitted specimens. The effects of the axial compression ratio and spacing of the steel strips on the cyclic behavior of the specimens were studied. Based on the test results, the failure modes, hysteretic characteristics, strength and stiffness degradation, displacement ductility, and energy dissipation capacity of the specimens were analyzed in-depth. The analysis showed that the transverse confinement provided by the high-strength steel strips could effectively delay and restrain diagonal crack development and improve the failure mode, which was flexural-shear failure controlled by flexural failure with better ductility. The specimens retrofitted using high-strength steel strips showed more satisfactory seismic performance than the control specimen. The seismic performance and deformation capacity of the retrofitted RC columns increased with decreasing axial compression ratio and steel strip spacing. Based on the test results, a hysteretic model for RC columns that considers the transverse confinement of high-strength steel strips was then established. The hysteretic model showed good agreement with the experimental results, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed hysteretic model. Therefore, the aforementioned analysis can be used for the design of retrofitted RC columns.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.339-355
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• 2022

The high cost of ultra-high-performance engineered cementitious composite (UHP-ECC) is currently a crucial issue, especially in terms of the polyethylene (PE) fibers use. In this paper, cheap calcium carbonate whiskers (CW) were evaluated on the feasibility of hybrid with PE fibers. Diverse combinations of PE fibers and CW were employed to investigate the multi-scale enhancement on the UHP-ECC performance. A probabilistic-based UHP-ECC tensile strain reliability analysis approach was utilized, which was in general agreement with the experimental results. Furthermore, a multi-dimensional integrated representation was conducted for the comprehensive assessment of UHP-ECC. Results illustrated that CW improved the compressive strength and energy dissipation capacity of UHP-ECC owing to the microscopic strengthening mechanism. CW and PE fiber further promoted the saturated cracking of composite by multi-scale crack arresting effect. In particular, PE1.75-CW0.5 specimen possessed the best overall performance. The ultimate cracking width of PE1.75-CW0.5 group had 98 ㎛, which was 46.18% lower compared to PE2-CW0 group, the 28d compressive strength were slightly improved, the tensile strain capacity was comparable to that of PE2-CW0 group. The results above demonstrated that combinations of PE fiber and CW could significantly enhance the comprehensive performance of UHP-ECC, which was beneficial for large-scale engineering applications.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.465-474
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• 2023

The point load test (PLT) is a widely-used alternative method in the field to determine the uniaxial compressive strength due to its simple testing machine and procedure. The point load test index can estimate the uniaxial compressive strength through conversion factors based on the rock types. However, the mechanism correlating these two parameters and the influence of the mechanical properties on PLT results are still not well understood. This study proposed a theoretical model to understand the mechanism of PLT serving as an alternative to the UCS test based on laboratory observation and literature survey. This model found that the point load test is a self-confined compression test. There is a compressive ellipsoid near the loading axis, whose dilation forms a tensile ring that provides confinement on this ellipsoid. The peak load of a point load test is linearly positive correlated to the tensile strength and negatively correlated to the Poisson ratio. The model was then verified using numerical and experimental approaches. In numerical verification, the PLT discs were simulated using flat-joint BPM of PFC3D to model the force distribution, crack propagation and BPM properties' effect with calibrated micro-parameters from laboratory UCS test and point load test of Berea sandstones. It further verified the mechanism experimentally by conducting a uniaxial compressive test, Brazilian test, and point load test on four different rocks. The findings from this study can explain the mechanism and improve the understanding of point load in determining uniaxial compressive strength.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.98-106
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• 2008

The strengthening in terms of efficiency, easy, economics is very popular method when it is applied to a damaged structures. The purpose of this study develops anchorage system that supports enough strengthening effect without any damage. In addition it is checked whether the method can be conveniently applied to structures. To verify strengthening effect a flexural experiments were performed. Four concrete beams were constructed and tested. Deflections, strains and modes of failure were recorded to examine strengthen of beams. Comparing crack load of each experimental data, yielding load, ultimate load, ductility index, and tendon stress were analyzed.